This week Time magazine announced that its person of the year is actually a group of people: “the Silence Breakers” who have courageously outed the alleged sexual predation of powerful men like Harvey Weinstein and Roger Ailes. This is a sign of real progress. The hope is that this continuing national reckoning will lead to a culture in which women are able to flourish without shame or fear.

But if the cases of high-profile men in politics, media and Hollywood are the cases at which the conversation stops, we will have missed a major opportunity to examine what the very worst sexual abuse looks like — and what we might do to stop it.… Seguir leyendo »

The northern edge of Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement, near the Place Pigalle, was once known as “la Nouvelle-Athènes,” both for the neo-Classical flourishes of its most graceful blocks and for the creative geniuses who swept in to inhabit them.

This was the original “gay Paree” on display in Edouard Manet’s “Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” a Bohemia of near-mythical proportions in which every tier of society — from the well heeled to the creative to the horizontally employed — collided in the district’s cafes, theaters and cabarets. It was the Paris of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Gustave Moreau and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Paris has long been a palimpsest of different cities, each new iteration grafted on top of the still visible last, spanning the extremes of human excellence and beauty and, just as crucially, filth and squalor.… Seguir leyendo »